The reason I use RVM in production is that it makes it trivially easy to:
1) Use multiple parallel Ruby versions for transitions and rollbacks - for example, when we upgraded from Ruby 1.9 to 2.0, we installed 2.0 via RVM, ran our staging environment on 2.0 while production ran on 1.9. The instant-rollback safety net is great, because if we run into some obscure bug on one VM, we just change our RVM environment config var and deploy and we're back to known-good in seconds with no downtime.
2) Run applications that require different Ruby version levels. For example, Puppet 2.7 wasn't compatible with Ruby 1.9+, but our app was running on 1.9. With a single system install, we'd not be able to run both.
The point about stepping out-of-bounds in regards to LTS distros is extremely valid, but at least in our case, it's not about "just effin' compile already!", but rather about flexibility and resilience - by using RVM, we absorb the burden for making sure things work rather than delegating it to our distro, but it's worth it for the things we pick up.
I would recommend running using chruby or just ruby-install and $PATH (chruby just changes the path variable) for those things since it is less invasive.
Personally I always try to run ftom apt in production.
1) Use multiple parallel Ruby versions for transitions and rollbacks - for example, when we upgraded from Ruby 1.9 to 2.0, we installed 2.0 via RVM, ran our staging environment on 2.0 while production ran on 1.9. The instant-rollback safety net is great, because if we run into some obscure bug on one VM, we just change our RVM environment config var and deploy and we're back to known-good in seconds with no downtime.
2) Run applications that require different Ruby version levels. For example, Puppet 2.7 wasn't compatible with Ruby 1.9+, but our app was running on 1.9. With a single system install, we'd not be able to run both.
The point about stepping out-of-bounds in regards to LTS distros is extremely valid, but at least in our case, it's not about "just effin' compile already!", but rather about flexibility and resilience - by using RVM, we absorb the burden for making sure things work rather than delegating it to our distro, but it's worth it for the things we pick up.